Killing Patton: The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General

Book Review: Killing Patton: The Strange Death of World War II’s Most Audacious General, Bill O’Reilly & Martin DugardThis is another superbly written book by the O’Reilly–Dugard duo. In my opinion, it is the second-best read in the “Killing” series. This is not faint praise, for all of the books in this series have sold in the millions of copies and been on every best-sellers list.The story is primarily about Lieutenant General George S. Patton, easily both the most ferocious and audacious general of World War Two. There is also background material on all of the major players in that conflict, including generals Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley; British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery; German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel—the only general in the war whom Patton considers his equal, with the possible exception of Eisenhower—and of course Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the heads of state in the European Theater of the war.The book is replete with details of the war in Europe. Unless you have studied that war in great detail, you will learn many things you probably did not know before.The story opens with the Allied forces poised to dig deeply into the German homeland. Patton’s Third Army confronts a German fort, Driant, an underground stronghold that blocks the way to the city of Metz, gateway to the Saarland—a region crucial to German war production. In the very first chapter we meet Private First Class Robert W. Holmlund, an explosives expert in Company B, Eleventh Infantry Regiment, Fifth Infantry Division of the Third Army. He is part of the force attacking Fort Driant. The date is October 3, 1944.Holmlund and the others in Company B, however, find themselves pinned down by enemy fire on the top of a hill with Fort Driant beneath them. Just as all seems lost, PFC Holmlund discovers a pipe leading straight down into the fort—a ventilation shaft. The pipe is too narrow for Holmlund to drop his TNT satchel charge into, so he calls for a Bangalore torpedo. A Bangalore is a narrow bomb, perhaps two inches in diameter and four feet long, packed with nine pounds of TNT, a blasting cap, and a timer to detonate the whole thing. Holmlund calculates how long it will take something to fall down the shaft, sets the timer accordingly, and drops the torpedo into the pipe. Everybody ducks. There is a loud explosion followed by the sound of Germans yelling.Holmlund calmly prepares a second Bangalore torpedo and drops it into the ventilation shaft. More yelling ensues. Evidently the Germans can’t wait to get out of the place. The Americans are ecstatic. They believe the fight for Driant is over. They are wrong. After blasting their way into the fort through an entrance, they discover that the place is a maze of narrow tunnels, and the Germans are not about to give it up easily.That evening, a German sniper’s bullet kills PFC Holmlund, whom General Patton posthumously awards the Distinguished Service Cross. The Allied forces bypass Fort Driant. They capture Metz and starve out the occupants. The Germans surrender Driant on December 8, 1944. So goes the war, and Killing Patton is filled with fascinating stories like this one.O’Reilly and Dugard describe the machinations and plotting, triumphs and mistakes, and all the other things that occur when powerful personalities interact or even clash on the battlefield.The authors reveal many things that are not common knowledge. For example, Patton was the G-2 (intelligence) officer in charge of Hawaiian Island security from 1935 to 1937. During this period, he forecast accurately that the Japanese could and probably would launch a surprise attack on the islands, thus becoming the first American officer to predict the attack on Pearl Harbor. What’s more, Patton’s own G-2, Colonel Oscar Koch, was the only Allied intelligence officer who believed that the German Wehrmacht was “poised to launch a withering Christmas counteroffensive” in December of 1944.Col. Koch has discovered that thirteen enemy infantry divisions, under cover of darkness, have crept into an area near the Ardennes Forest. Furthermore, he has confirmed that five Panzer divisions with some five hundred tanks have recently moved toward the Ardennes. He is convinced that the Germans plan a surprise counterattack—and soon.George Patton takes his intelligence officer seriously. He tells his commanders to begin planning on emergency measures to rescue the First Army if the Germans attack to the north in the Ardennes. He says that should this happen, his own planned offensive into Germany—called “Operation Tink”—will be called off, “And we’ll have to go up there and save their hides.” Prophetic words. Just two weeks before this, Patton had written in his diary, “The First Army is making a terrible mistake. It is highly probable the Germans are building up east of here.” Seldom have truer words been written.At precisely 5:30 a.m. on December 16, 1944, the Wehrmacht launches its counteroffensive. It begins with a massive artillery barrage that deafens some of the troops firing the weapons. Within four days the Germans punch a hole fifty miles wide and seventy-five miles deep into what had been Allied territory.In most instances, the authors are careful to point out the correct terminology used by the military for the facts of warfare. But here there is a mystifying omission. The great German counterattack, dubbed almost instantly by the press as “The Battle of the Bulge,” was—as the authors point out—a salient. The dictionary definition of salient is “an outwardly projecting part of a fortification, trench system, or line of defense.” That it was. But this was not the term the military high command used for the Battle of the Bulge. They called it the “Ardennes Breakthrough” or the “Ardennes Counteroffensive.”In writing about a general staff meeting—held on December 19, 1944, at Verdun, France—the authors make a mistake. They write that Eisenhower asks for “a counterattack with at least three divisions.” And just a few minutes later, when Patton says he can attack the morning of December twenty-first “with three divisions,” everyone is stunned because Patton “has made a fool of himself”—by telling Ike that he will do what he has just been asked to do? Please!What Ike actually said was, “I want you to command this move—under Brad’s supervision, of course—making a strong counterattack with at least six divisions. When can you start?”Patton, however, sticks to his guns. True to his word, he launches his rescue effort with three divisions beginning on December 21, 1944. Moving as fast as they can under trying circumstances, the Third Army divisions manage to get to Bastogne and relieve the beleaguered First Army’s 101st Airborne Division before the Germans can overrun it. They stop the German advance. The date is December 26, 1944.The most amusing episode related in Killing Patton is also one of the most revealing, in that it exposes the inner nature of both Eisenhower and Patton. It begins when Patton’s Third Army takes the German stronghold of Trier on the Moselle River. After a week of ferocious fighting, the Third Army came out on top—as usual. The city fell on March 1, 1945.Shortly afterwards, Patton receives a message from Allied headquarters, presumably on Eisenhower’s orders. The message reads, “Bypass Trier. It will take four divisions to capture it.”With acid humor, Patton sends his reply, “Have taken Trier with two divisions. What do you want me to do? Give it back?”One can only imagine Patton’s mischievous grin as he wrote those words.Patton also predicted that Eisenhower would become president of the United States. He told one of his generals, “Before long, Ike will be running for president. You think I’m joking? Just wait and see.”Once again, Patton has been uncannily prescient.One week after the reply to headquarters about Trier, Eisenhower approves Patton’s plan to invade the Palatinate. While Montgomery procrastinates, building up his forces to cross the Rhine, Patton is attacking. His Palatinate campaign is regarded as one of the most brilliant strategies of the war. “The greatest threat,” said one German officer later, “was the whereabouts of the feared U.S. Third Army. Where is [Patton]? When will he attack? Where? How? With what?”Patton has eight full divisions on the western shore of the Rhine. All he needs is a way to get across.Finding a weak spot, he builds a pontoon bridge, which he uses to sneak a division across the river—without the loss of a single man. On March 23, 1945, he calls Omar Bradley and says, “For God’s sake, tell the world we’re across.” Then he adds, “I want the world to know [the] Third Army made it before Monty starts to cross.”Patton’s audacity knows no bounds.O’Reilly and Dugard describe these and many other episodes like them to depict both the complexities and abilities of George S. Patton. We widely regard him as having been the best general on any side in the Great War. If we had General Patton and his Third Army available to us today, I believe we could clean out ISIS inside of three months. He and his army were as close to invincible as any fighting force in history.Yet as O’Reilly and Dugard point out, Patton made many enemies during the war, some of them powerful men. Hitler came to both despise and fear Patton. Stalin considered Patton dangerous and wanted him dead. Field Marshall Montgomery hated Patton. The feeling was mutual. The only mystery was which of the two held the other in greater contempt. Harry Truman, who had become president after the death of Roosevelt, “detest[ed] Patton’s flashy style.” Even Eisenhower turned against Patton in the end, relieving the general of his command over the Third Army. Patton’s fighting days were over.In the end, however, his demise remains a mystery. It should not be a spoiler to say that O’Reilly and Dugard did not solve the secret of Patton’s death. Many have tried; all have failed. Why should these two be an exception?All the authors could find were indications of possible accidental or intentional cover-up: missing accident reports, lost records. An official report stating that there were others in the vehicle that struck Patton’s jeep “like every other document relating to the accident has disappeared.” And “Attempts by the authors of this book to find the official accident report were unsuccessful. It if it does exist, it is well hidden.”At the end of their Afterword, the authors write that “the tough old general did not go out on his own terms, and there are many unanswered questions surrounding his death. Those questions deserve to be addressed.”Regardless of the authors’ inability to solve the mystery of Patton’s death, their book Killing Patton is one of the most fascinating reads you are liable to come across any time soon. Masterfully written and highly recommended.ReferenceO’Reilly, Bill, and Martin Dugard. Killing Patton: The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General. New York: Henry Holt and Company LLC, 2014. ISBN 978-0-8050-9668-2 (hardback); ASIN B00JYZAPXY (Kindle).

I thoroughly enjoyed this well written recounting of Patton and the end of WWII. For those who don't know, Patton was demoted and ignored by less-competent Generals who took the credit for Patton's accomplishments and then removed Patton from active duty at the end of the war. After a number of unexplained near-fatal events, Patton died after being hospitalized after a suspicious car accident. Like Lincoln in a previous book by these authors, Patton had a lot of unexplained coincidences that can only be called conspiratorial.If you've read these author's  Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever  you will find this book fairly similar in style and content. The authors give interesting, short vignettes, often little known, that mount up to the death of the main figure of the book. This book has a number of heroic figures in it.This book also notes the failures of others around Patton starting with Presidents Roosevelt and Truman on down. If you are only a casual student of history, you will be shocked at the blunders and downright idiotic, harmful and unamerican things done by Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Marshall and Bradley. You will also find the occasional unsavory tidbit about Patton like his rare military error and unfaithfulness to his wife.Most of the book is about Patton and the US Army during the last year of WWII from the Battle of the Bulge on to the end. There really isn't much about the actual death of Patton other than a quick statement that he was in a car crash and that all the records have gone missing and there was no real investigation of a highly suspicious death of America's best General who had won the war and was going back to civilian life with political ambitions and career-ending knowledge of figures like Truman, Eisenhower and Marshall. The authors do not go into detail of the hospitalization of Patton, the lack of security and the credible claims that he was finally killed by the Russian operatives. These claims are actually well supported and this book would have been better and more interesting if these things were included.A few pages on WWII and Patton prior to the last year of the war would have provided helpful context. Patton was a superior of nearly every officer promoted by Roosevelt over him. Patton had been the commanding General, in essentially Eisenhower's position, during the first part of WWII. It was Patton who led the landings and battles in North Africa. It was Patton who negotiated the surrender of the Vichy French that kept casualties so low. It was Patton who invaded Sicily and Italy. Roosevelt elevated inferior officers, both in rank and ability, over Patton although he had performed both militarily and diplomatically almost to perfection. Patton was relieved by these inferiors who now outranked him over a minor incident where he slapped a "combat fatigued" but otherwise unharmed soldier in a field hospital - something that the regular soldier who had stayed at his post applauded. Such a minor incident was inflated by a press bent on destroying Patton and controlled by political hacks and riddled with Communist spies. Patton had to grovel to get back in the war and was demoted.One of the many unsettling parts of this book is the authors noting that the press essentially plotted to bring down Patton and to inflate Eisenhower, Marshall and especially the homicidal mass-murderer Stalin. It is extremely unsettling, to say the least, to read of the traitorous activities of our own journalists. When you add in the number of Communist traitors from Duncan Lee, descendant of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, who was chief of staff of "Wild" Bill Donovan, who headed the OSS/CIA, and a Russian agent who gave away information like the exact location of our nuclear bomb research (the kind of information that led to the execution of the Rosenbergs) to George Marshall who abandoned tens of thousands of our own soldiers to the Russians who exterminated them, the unease grows exponentially. Yes, Eisenhower, Truman and Marshall let tens of thousands of Americans who had been prisoners and had been "freed" by the Russians be exterminated by the Russians so as not to upset them. If that isn't upsetting enough, the book also superficially notes the millions of innocent Poles, other Eastern Europeans and German Civilians who were forced to go over to the Russians who annihilated most of them in prison camps. No wonder they were scared of Patton who tried to prevent these heinous American barbarisms and knew exactly what was happening and who was responsible.For a better understanding of the events I recommend Patton's  War As I Knew It . Though this is a heavily edited book of excerpts from Patton's extensive diaries, it does give you a fair idea of some of Patton's accomplishments. There really isn't a World War II history book that is complete in the sense of including things like Patton's alleged assassination, the lies of Eisenhower and the rest of the high American command, the American penetration and almost complete control by Russian spies, the American giving of nuclear materials and incredible amounts of armaments that our own armies needed to lower the casualties to Russia and the savage forced repatriation to the Russians of millions of allies, many of whom had fought for us. In books like this one, you can read parts of this story, but the whole story is too monstrous to even imagine and I suspect such a book will never be written. I'm sorry if all this is new but I urge you to check it out yourself. O'Reilly and Dugard are definitely on to something.The most controversial part of this book, and one which is only superficially touched upon, is the allegation that Patton was targeted not just by the Russians, but by our own side via the CIA precursor, the OSS led by "Wild" Bill Donovan - as unsavory a character as any in fiction. In a 4 page "afterword", the authors weakly say "The strange death of George S. Patton should be reexamined." The depth of the evidence that Patton was the target of assassination is documented in several places. The authors briefly mention an American OSS agent named Douglas Bazata who claims that he was paid $10,000 dollars personally by Donovan to assassinate Patton who was causing trouble about our heinous acts and the heinous nature of the Russians. Bazata has back-up testimony and other evidence supporting him. Bazata says the reason Patton was paralyzed in a low impact auto accident that didn't hurt anyone else is that the accident was a cover for his assassination attempt using a low velocity projectile that broke Patton's neck and scalped him. Patton was actually recovering in the hospital and planninge on going home the next day when, according to Bazata, Russians finished the job by poisoning Patton through his IV while Patton's security had been removed. I know, I know, hard to believe and it leaves a sinking feeling in your gut. I recommend the book  Target: Patton: The Plot to Assassinate General George S. Patton  which includes Bazata's story as well as further invetigative work by the author, Wilcox. You should also note that the Patton family does not believe this story - at least publicly. Make up your own mind. I will say that I have met some OSS people and these were scary guys with wild stories. And the occasional German Officers I have met over the years are unanimous in their respect and praise for Patton.All in all, another well written book in this series, filled with interesting vignettes and unanswered questions with the weaknesses I have pointed out. 4 stars.

Loved the book. Dived straight in to Pattons War from around 1944 onwards. However, if you put together what was actually written about Patton, then it probably took only half the book (or less) interspaces with facts about the campaigns from Sicily to the crossing of the Rhine. I found it a great read and couldn’t put it down. A bit more about the Generals life would have been great, but nevertheless, I enjoyed it. Has made me want to search for the 70’s films Patton and Brass Target.

I enjoyed reading this and found it difficult to put down. Patton makes an interesting subject probably because he was a larger than life and controversial character in real life. The book is well written and in the style of a novel whilst not missing out on the facts. Recommended reading.

Really interesting book.I always love the enigma called General George S. Patton and this gives a little look into the world of the Greatest US Armor General in World War 2 and possibly ever. Looks into a theory about the Generals' car accident if it was a set-up,a hit.Read the book for his case.

A good account of World War II and the life and death of General Patton. I am not a great fan of the writing style of Bill O'Reilly and his co writer, but it gets the job done. The job being to explain matters in a no-nonsense way so that ordinary non specialist readers can understand.

These books are so very easily read and give concise accurate information ..should be read by every student.Intend to read all of them as they are published.RECOMMEND THEM THOROUGHLY!